Jimmy Hoffa's Revealing Choice of an Enemy

Go ahead and call me naive, but for the moment I'm willing to give the Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa the benefit of the doubt that his rant yesterday in Detroit was not a call for violence. If anyone needs more evidence that the union establishment has been hijacked by leftish ideologues though, Hoffa left a pretty clear indicator of what his real priorities are.

As he called for his (entirely metaphorical, we presume) army to mobilize, Hoffa also identified its enemy — the Tea Party.

Now this is interesting, because ordinarily we rely on unions to represent workers in the workplace. If Hoffa had aligned his forces against employers who had pushed for concessions, delayed hiring workers or shifted production overseas, one might still have questioned his understanding of economics, but he would be addressing workplace issues such as jobs, wages, benefits and working conditions. But the Tea Party has few if any employees, and (to this writer's knowledge at least) none of them are unionized. In terms of collective bargaining — supposedly the chief role of any union — a union president should have bigger fish to fry than the Tea Party.

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